A Million Minds Are Better Than One
The science section of today’s New York Times highlights an organization called InnoCentive that seeks to solve the most challenging problems by inviting a large number of people from different walks of life to participate in the process. The article, If You Have a Problem, Use Incentive to Ask Everyone, describes the process of crowdsourcing as a way to encourage innovation and outside-the-box-thinking:
The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, reflects “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating” enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code, or original programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.
The trick, of course, is to structure the process appropriately.
New Fundraising Companies Focus on Green Products
Grist points out an article in today’s Wall Street Journal on new companies that offer environmentally friendlier products for sale at fundraisers for schools and non-profit organizations.
As the article observes, selling products that are environmentally (or otherwise) harmful to raise funds for a good cause clearly sends a mixed message. This concern can be elevated in importance when it is children who are asked to sell products to raise funds for their school. Such concerns helped prompt the entrepreneurs cited in the article to find better alternatives to the standard fundraising offerings.
Healthcare for the Planet?
Celsias today highlighted companies that collect waste products and use them to create energy or useful goods through methods that are carbon neutral.
As one of the entrepreneurs quoted in the article notes, “Nature doesn’t make any waste.” When we redesign our processes in a thoughtful way, we can move society closer to the standard that nature sets. One company described in the article sees its role in redesigning processes we live by as a form of planetary healthcare.
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